The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [73]
Working nonstop with the Jordanians on uncovering the plot, we were quickly impressed with the caliber of their agents. They were expert at monitoring suspects in Jordan and had developed leads tracking the operatives involved from Afghanistan and across the Middle East. We told them what we had learned about al-Qaeda from operations in the UK, Albania, and elsewhere, and they, in turn, taught us a lot about al-Qaeda’s worldwide operations. The Jordanians left no stone unturned in protecting their country from potentially devastating attacks.
I was the only FBI agent continuously working in Amman on the millennium threat, as the other agents rotated in and out of the country—usually for two weeks at a time. We worked from the U.S. Embassy and shared space with the [1 word redacted]. Before I arrived I had been warned about the [4 words redacted], whom I will call Fred. He had been a translator at the FBI New York office and had applied to be an agent but had been rejected, after which he had joined the CIA. He was said to have held a grudge against all FBI agents after that.
My problems with him started within the first couple of days, after Pat D’Amuro received a phone call from FBI headquarters saying that my reporting of intelligence and Fred’s reporting of the same events didn’t match up. This meant that Washington didn’t know whose information to trust. The further problem was that American citizens were involved, and if intelligence didn’t match, we would have difficulty prosecuting the case.
An investigation was done and the Jordanians were consulted, and all concerned were advised that my reporting was correct and Fred’s was faulty. Fred’s basic failure was that he had a tendency to jump to conclusions without facts. For example, in one memo he reported that the group that had been identified within Jordan was training with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, which he also took to mean that the Jordanian group was linked to Iran as well, as Iran is Hezbollah’s main sponsor. In my reporting I made no mention of Hezbollah and said only that the Jordanians were linked to Palestinian terrorist groups. Fred drew this faulty conclusion because the Jordanian group had trained in the Bekaa Valley: he knew that Hezbollah operated in the Bekaa Valley, so that was his “proof” of Hezbollah’s involvement. Because of his flawed analysis, a total of twelve [2 words redacted]—intelligence reports—had to be withdrawn. If portions of a cable are shown to be inaccurate, the entire cable is viewed as unreliable and suspect. The presumption is that one can’t trust the accuracy of the person writing it; therefore, it’s rendered useless. Happily, the problems with the [1 word redacted] did not impair our working relationship with the GID, which carried over into the personal. Our partners regularly took us to dinner and even family events. We enjoyed each other’s company and appreciated being able to share skills and impart different insights.
Months after we had left Jordan, Saad and his team came to visit us in New York. John O’Neill and Pat D’Amuro rolled out the red carpet. The operatives who had worked with us in the field honored me by having dinner at my place, a small one-bedroom apartment. It was the evening of the NFL Super Bowl, and it was snowing. My partner Steve Bongardt; Mark Rossini, the FBI agent detailed to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center; Fred; and assistant U.S. attorney Pat Fitzgerald all attended. We ate and joked for hours, and it was a night to remember.
During the Jordanian investigation, the GID gave the [2 words redacted] chief of operations, Alvin—later the CTC’s Sunni extremists chief—a box of evidence to go through. Alvin took it into his office, dumped it in the corner, and never looked through it. Nor did he tell me or my FBI colleagues about it. The division of labor in this instance was that Saad had delegated the task to Alvin,